Flash camera control using ActionScript and php to save photo

I have a Adobe Flash-based photo taking control. it works fine on a linux host but fails on Windows (IIS). the folder was set to the equivalent of "chmod 777" on the IIS box but simply does not save the JPGencoded photo captured by ActionScript within the photo booth SWF.
surely considering how ubiquitous php is (regardless of merit) there must be a way to set it up properly for a simple php script to save the image to a JPG file.

what is wrong with this? ... "itemID=<? $itemID ?>"
That assumes that the PHP "short tags" setting is enabled. It's a bad idea to enable that for a variety of reasons, mostly related to XML. The full PHP statement is the one I would use. Parentheses are not needed with echo; there is no extra credit for adding unnecessary punctuation to the code."itemID=<?php echo $_GET['itemID']; ?>"

But I would not use the $_GET array directly as shown in this statement. Instead I would acknowledge the fact that the $_GET array is external data, which is by definition tainted and a potential attack vector. So I would filter and sanitize the values in $_GET before I used them in my script. PHP has the filter_var() functions to help you with this.

I assume it's OK to pass FlashVars via this javascript approach, eh?
Maybe. It depends on the sequence of what you need to make happen. Here is the general order of things.
1. Client makes a request to the server
2. PHP script runs to create HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc
3. PHP script writes headers and browser output containing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. End of PHP
4. Client receives the completed response from the server
5. Client browser loads the DOM, guided by the HTML and CSS, runs the JavaScript, renders a web page and starts the Flash animation.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your project. As you manipulate variables in PHP, always remember that var_dump() is your friend!

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PHP does not need Linux to work properly. The overwhelming majority of PHP installations use Linux, but there is nothing inherent in Windows that would necessarily cripple PHP. And there are lots of IIS installations of PHP. Don't worry about that part, at least not for now.

Here is an example to illustrate the concept of looking at variables. In the segment of code posted above, there is this line:

file_put_contents($filename, $jpg);

All by itself that line of code raises three important questions.

How do you know what the $filename variable contains? How do you know what the $jpg variable contains? How do you know whether file_put_contents() worked or not? The answers to these questions are available if you visualize the variables. You can use var_dump() to print out variables. You can test the return code from file_put_contents() to see if it worked. This man page and the added note seems like it would be important:http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-put-contents.php#101349